GM’s outgoing CEO likes to complain about the government’s 61 percent stake in the reborn company, but thanks to all that Washington meddling, GM has gone from losing $88 billion over four years to making a couple of billion in six months.

Broadway and Central Avenue in the Watts area of South Los Angeles are lined with dozens of small, marginal businesses, but hardly any banks. In a capitalist economy, these are streets without capital, losers in the race to the top.

Rep. Maxine Waters may be in deep ... trouble if she’s found guilty of the trio of ethics charges that a House committee hit her with Monday. The congresswoman apparently plans to contest the violations ... (continued)

A $26 billion aid package was passed by the Senate on Thursday that aims to ensure that school districts and states do not have to can tens of thousands of teachers and government workers. Just two Republicans crossed the ideological aisle to support the bill, which now heads to the House.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a stalwart progressive voice in the House for nearly 20 years, is defending herself against charges that she improperly intervened to help bail out a bank with ties to her husband. Waters released a statement denying any wrongdoing, saying she was merely working on behalf of minority banks.

Sticks and stones and all that: U.S. bankers are probably glad today that, as the childhood rhyme claims, “words can never hurt me,” since the Obama administration’s so-called pay czar has decided to criticize them for paying out $1.6 billion in extra payments to top execs after they received federal bailout funds—but not seek any punishment.

Thanks to the defection of the two relatively enlightened Republican senators from Maine and the quick replacement of the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, unemployment checks that had been stalled for millions of American families since early June will soon resume. But for Republicans, it has been a defining issue that will haunt the party.

Those of us who have stood aghast and watched as Goldman Sachs seemed to sail almost unscathed through the erupting economic catastrophe of the last two years (thank you, bailout!) might stop now for a moment of pure schadenfreude, as the megabank’s profits took a precipitous dive in the second quarter of this year.

American International Group, 80 percent owned by the U.S. government, has announced it will pay out $725 million in a settlement of a securities fraud lawsuit, begun in 2004, that accused the insurance Gargantua of accounting fraud and stock manipulation.

If you thought tea party politics were just for rabid wingnuts and certain Twitter-prone politicians, think again or else you may miss out on some hot stock market action before the November elections.

“False security is no security at all,” writes the Wisconsin senator, who says he will not vote for the financial reform bill because it would not prevent another meltdown and “has Wall Street’s fingerprints all over it.” According to Feingold, “the administration and conference leaders have gone to significant lengths to avoid making the bill stronger.”

A devastating report in The New York Times documents how Timothy Geithner’s New York Fed worked tirelessly to make sure that AIG was forced to pay banks such as Goldman Sachs 100 percent on dubious contracts that might otherwise have been slashed or subjected to lawsuits. (continued)

With a relative drop in the bailout bucket, the president thinks he can save 300,000 teachers who would otherwise be kept by economic calamity from annoying America’s children. The money would go to state and local governments struggling to make ends meet.

Someone is going to bear the massive cost of damage to the Gulf Coast economy, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is out to make sure it isn’t the oil firms whose rig caused the catastrophe in the first place.

On Thursday Robert Scheer responded to reader questions and comments about his column “Blame Clinton, Not Paul.” Scheer said, “both Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the interests of black and brown people and those who got stuck with subprime mortgages, and that’s the pressing civil rights issue right now.”

People close to the case are claiming that AIG executive Joseph Cassano will not face federal charges related to allegations that he misled investors over the company’s handling of mortgage-related securities prior to the economic crash and subsequent Wall Street bailout.

The German Parliament has approved a series of measures allowing the country to provide up to $184 billion in loan guarantees in a package aimed at stabilizing the euro and helping support those European nations that are mired in debt.

When big financial institutions got themselves into a serious pickle in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve was there with beaucoup bucks in loans to prop them up. On Tuesday, the Senate voted unanimously to launch an inquiry into the Fed’s lending practices during the financial crisis.

Bob Bennett, three-term Republican senator from Utah, has been ousted from running for re-election by the conservative tea party movement after he was deemed unfit (he supported health care reform). Bennett came in third at the state Republican convention in Salt Lake City.

Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?

The once-mighty euro, a currency that humbled American tourists in its day, has sunk to a 13-month low against the dollar. Greece’s impending bailout apparently isn’t settling nerves in the eurozone, which includes other major economies that look a little wobbly as of late.

Step right up and you’ll see spectacles that will amaze from Tuesday’s face-off between senators and Goldman Sachs boss men, such as the awesome Fabrice Tourre denying “categorically” that he misled clients by selling them mysterious bundled financial entities tied to doomed mortgages.

President Obama and his allies won’t have an easy time as they attempt to do some major renovations of our financial system, but according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, they at least have the support of the majority of Americans.

President Obama spoke before a group of fat cats—or rather, “titans of industry,” as he called them—from Wall Street on Thursday at Cooper Union in New York City, the same site where he’d delivered his pre-bailout, pre-presidential speech on the economy two years ago, in an attempt ... (continued)

Financial reform is the next big task on Congress’ list of action items, and on Wednesday the Senate Agriculture Committee made progress by approving a bill by committee Chair Blanche Lincoln that targets the derivatives market. (continued)

The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.

Congressional Republicans are mobilizing for an assault on President Obama’s next regulatory project: financial reform. However, Obama’s not hearing it when it comes to the GOP’s claim that the Democrats’ current bill would make it easier for big financial institutions to angle for government bailouts down the line.

Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran walking 90 miles to make a point, is the new face of the resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.

The 16 nations that use the euro have just revealed an aid package of up to $40 billion in an effort to stem the Greek financial crisis. Finance ministers see the offer as a “step of clarification” for markets and a boost for the faltering euro.

Let us stop to collectively mourn a new figure from The New York Times: Chief executives in the United States’ largest publicly traded companies found that their compensation dropped 15 percent in 2009, hitting bourgeois rock bottom at a measly $9.53 million yearly average.

Why is America so deeply polarized, politically speaking? This week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center” finds Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley discussing the partisan divisions in the country and agreeing at least on the point that those rifts have never been this deep. But why is there so much anger?